Countless words wriggled within that ominous dark-red light. They reached into the sphere’s depths, which seemed to stretch into infinity despite its small size. The sphere could no longer be described as water—it was now a mass or a liquid made of text.
The strange liquid descended from the air and settled on the floor, where it wobbled like jelly.
“Bravo! Oh, happy day! It’s finished,” Asahi Fujinaka said, clapping and standing up from a nearby folding chair.
“Hooray!” cheered Third, who had been standing drowsily next to him. She pumped her fists and white pigtails in the air.
“Really? That puny thing is what you wanted to make?” Pyrovault walked over to the liquid text wearing his usual black coat. He timidly poked the red substance, which did nothing but wobble. “That ain’t a book or a person. What happened to that clone of yourself?”
“I used it as the base,” Asahi Fujinaka said.
The one-eyed man approached the red liquid and carefully scraped it off the floor with a clipboard. He then walked to a nearby cluster of giant blue mushrooms and closed his eyes.
The liquid text emitted red light, which sapped the brightness of the blue mushrooms. The mushrooms’ forms then wavered and withered before their very eyes. Black words rose to the surface of the mushrooms and were sucked into the red liquid.
In the span of a few seconds, the giant mushrooms had transformed into a single human corpse.
Pyrovault frowned. “What the actual hell? Were these mushrooms originally a person?”
“Never mind that! What you’re about to see will drive it from your mind completely!” Asahi Fujinaka said, his eyes shining. “Behold!”
He closed his eyes again, and this time a huge amount of text flowed out of the red liquid. It wrapped around the folding chair that Asahi Fujinaka was just sitting in, covering it in writing from a language that none of them recognized, then quickly disappeared.
“Third, destroy that chair!” he commanded.
“Sir, yes, sir! Hi-yah!”
Third wove her fists of hair together and swung them at the chair like a hammer. The blow was strong enough to cave in the concrete floor so, unsurprisingly, it shattered the chair to pieces.
“Whuh?” Third cried out.
Somehow, the chair had appeared next to her fists of hair fully formed. The shattered fragments had disappeared. She immediately wrapped her hair around the chair and squeezed it like a boa constrictor, crushing it and sending leather and metal fragments flying across the room…until it again reappeared on the floor in one piece. There was no sign that it had been destroyed twice now.
“Grrr…”
Third stubbornly continued to pound the chair, but the result was always the same. It always reappeared as if nothing had happened.
Asahi Fujinaka proudly lifted his chin, unbothered by the clamor Third was making.
“Giant azure mushrooms. They were thought to have grown from a single man in Gifu Prefecture. There were seven in total, and nothing could be done to decrease their numbers. You could slice them, crush them, or burn them, but all seven giant mushrooms would reappear a second later as if nothing had happened,” he said.
“And now the distortion belonging to those mushrooms is inside that folding chair,” Pyrovault observed as he watched Third pulverize the chair in the corner of his eye.
“Precisely! We’ve finally obtained it! A tool that can Compile this world’s very distortions!”
This new creation could be used to collect and employ not reality, existences, and concepts—but distortions themselves. The implications of that were huge.
“A distortion that prevents its owner from being distorted in any way is wasted on a mushroom. What if you took that distortion and applied it to a person or a weapon? There are vanits that are difficult to manage and use because of their size or nature, but that need no longer be a concern! We can take their distortions and use them however we please!” Asahi Fujinaka declared, balling his fists excitedly.
“Looks like it might be too soon for you to celebrate,” Pyrovault said.
The folding chair was still undamaged, but it was all wrong. The casters that should have been on the ends of the legs were instead attached to the seat, and the back of the chair was facing the wrong way.
“Ah. I suppose the seven mushrooms didn’t always reform in the exact same shape. Well, this is no problem. We can work out the kinks with some trial and error,” Asahi Fujinaka said.
“Does that mean we can consider your project a success?” Pyrovault asked, peering at the small sphere.
“Absolutely! It will give you all exactly what you want! Let’s perform all kinds of experiments! I call it Force, and we must find out exactly what it is capable of!”
“Sure… Got one thing to do before that, though.”
Pyrovault stabbed Asahi Fujinaka through the gut with his metal arm.
“Huh…? Gak… Why?” the one-eyed man gasped.
“Sorry, bud. Just followin’ orders.”
Asahi Fujinaka’s arms went limp, and Force rolled down the clipboard. Pyrovault caught it with his other arm.
“Whew, that felt good. It was hard as hell restraining myself while watchin’ you have fun pummeling that chair.”
“Papa!” Third shrieked, her face contorted by a demonic rage. She swung a fist of hair at Pyrovault, but the bands that tied her pigtails suddenly burst into green flames. “Wha—?! Aaaaahhh! What’s happening?!”
They were the same hair bands that Pyrovault had given her in the Duplicator Tree forest.
“That’s on you. You should know better than to wear something given to you by an old man you’ve never met,” he said.
“Ow! It burns!”
Her hair caught fire, and she squirmed as if her skin was burning.
“I know that’s your main body,” Pyrovault said.
Ash fluttered from her burning hair to the floor. Close inspection of her hair revealed it to be made of thin scraps of paper covered in tiny letters.
Asahi Fujinaka placed trembling hands on the arm piercing his gut.
“I—I don’t understand… I thought…I still had…v-value to you all…,” he wheezed.
“Catch up, Asahi Fujinaka. Is your brain out for lunch?” Pyrovault leaned into the man’s face with a thin smile. “You said it yourself. We can make as many of you as we want. Even better, we can alter those versions of you any way we want. As long as we have that green book and your daughter.”
“I…see.”
“Now you get it. The real, unpredictable you is much less useful to us than a version of you who follows every order. So why not go with the latter?”
Pyrovault pressed Force into his own chest. The liquid text seeped into his black coat, and columns of strange letters appeared on it like embroidery.
“Don’t worry about your little creation. I’ll make good use of it. So will the new you,” he said.
He saw a bright flash of light in the corner of his eye.
“Get away from him!” Third shrieked, swinging a fist of hair. Pyrovault threw Asahi Fujinaka down and dodged it.
He looked up and saw a girl glaring at him even as her hair burned with green flames.
Third. She was Asahi Fujinaka’s third book, which he gave the ability to Compile existences.
“Papa!”
She rushed toward her one and only creator, completely unconcerned about herself. The man was on his last breaths. Blood was gushing out of the wound in his gut now that Pyrovault had removed his arm. His white coat was quickly turning red.
Third put her small hands to the wound, bravely trying to plug it. She had to have been in agony because of her burning hair, which was her main body, but she didn’t care. Her hands were trembling violently.
“I hate you!” she screamed, striking at Pyrovault with her burning hair. Pyrovault pulled a vial out of his coat and smashed it on the floor, creating a wall of flame that blocked her attack.
“Hey, little dolly. You’re just behaving the way that old man programmed you to. Can’t you spare any concern for yourself?”
“I don’t care about that!” Third shouted. Her eyes burned brighter than her hair. “I’m living the life I was created to live! So what if I was programmed?! So what if I’m a tool?! I just want to live the life I was given to the fullest! Papa is the only reason I exist!”
Third split her tresses into thinner bundles despite knowing that would increase the surface area of her hair and cause it to burn faster. She used some of those bundles to slice through the wall of fire and the rest to try to pick up Pyrovault.
“Now that’s the spirit! Let’s fight!” Pyrovault said.
He pulled something out of his coat and used it to deflect Third’s hair with a loud whack. It was the road sign. Vials began to spill from his coat. They were all different colors, and with each one that emerged, the red geometric pattern on his coat shined brighter.
“Don’t worry about these. They’re just vanit residue,” he said.
The vials continued to spill endlessly from his coat, forming a giant pile that lifted him atop it.
“I feel so much lighter now. Wanna help me test my new capabilities?” Pyrovault held his metal hand out toward Third. The same red letters that were on his coat appeared on his hand.
He casually swung his arm down.
Bent steel frames had been stabbed into the weed-covered ground. A dust cloud hung in the air, accompanied by the faint scent of blood. It was in that environment that Karamori wiped sweat from his face.
Signs of destruction were all around him. Here the ground was gouged; there a concrete building had collapsed. Few things within the barrier of text maintained their prior shape.
Karamori breathed heavily, getting blood from his hands on his face.
“You’re quite stubborn,” the blond-haired girl across from him said, her voice colder than ice. Archive calmly watched him from atop her dirt giant’s shoulder. Unlike Karamori, her hair and clothes were completely undisturbed. The red book floating next to her didn’t have a speck of dirt on it.
There was a good reason for that—in the ten minutes since the fight began, Karamori hadn’t hit her once. He hadn’t even tried.
“I suppose that is also fate’s influence. Your sword does not allow you to die easily.”
Archive twisted her red string into a new shape.